


stand in the sun then

by the-reylo-void (Anysia)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Batuu, Character Study, F/M, Fate & Destiny, Force Bond (Star Wars), He's Not Too Happy About It, Important Hairstyles, Introspection, Pining, Possibly Unrequited Love, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, so much pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 10:10:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20445419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anysia/pseuds/the-reylo-void
Summary: Kylo approaches the First Order's mission on Batuu with a detachment and focus befitting of the Supreme Leader. At least until he starts seeing an all-too-familiar hairstyle popping up with alarming regularity throughout Black Spire Outpost.





	stand in the sun then

**Author's Note:**

> So many things informed this fic, but chief among them is the new world of Batuu at Galaxy's Edge in the Disney parks. I was fortunate enough to be asked along for cast member previews at the Florida version earlier this month (shout-out to my beloved bestie, a CM at Kilimanjaro Safaris) and just completely fell in love with the whole set-up. 
> 
> There's also so much potential tension between the Resistance and First Order sections, particularly with Rey and Kylo both running around. And, oddly enough, I noticed that a lot of the inhabitants of Batuu are sporting Rey's signature three-bun style. With Supreme Leader Kylo Ren spending his time patrolling the outpost, I wondered what it might be like if he noticed, too. 
> 
> I'm very out of practice and stretching my writing legs after a sustained absence, so I dearly hope you enjoy.

Batuu is unremarkable. 

There are towering domed buildings looming over narrow squares filled with market stalls and the endless travelers one would expect of a busy spaceport. There are tourists, sightseers pawing through trays of relics of questionable authenticity, weak-kneed humans and robust aliens alike staggering out of the dimly-lit cantina reeking of stale liquor, everything humming with activity and loud voices calling out above the din. 

“The north end has been secured under First Order control,” the grey-uniformed officer at Kylo’s side notes dispassionately as the two of them stare through the viewport of the command shuttle. “But we’ve arrested three more travelers under suspicion of Resistance sympathies in the vicinity of Oga’s Cantina. The proprietor is displeased with the interruption of his business.”

“Deal with him, then.” His voice is a familiar deep, graveled rumble as it passes through the vocoder of his mask. 

The officer pauses, and Kylo observes him through his visor. The mask has only recently returned to his face, carefully soldered back together in a dark ceremony that had somehow unsettled him even as it had thrilled his knights (_ “that’s the man you were meant to be,” one had said, voice thickly distorted through his own mask, and Kylo had felt it like a strike to the heart, remembered being bared to the waist, bared to the soul and speaking soft, similar words to…) _. 

But it is easier, somehow, to hide behind the scarred metal as he tends to the responsibilities of the Supreme Leader. 

Easy to remember why he’d forged and adopted it in the first place. 

“We’ve had reports from the south and east about growing Resistance activity,” the officer continues, glancing at his datapad. “General Hux has scheduled frequent trooper patrols of the contested sectors. Our spies have also become deeply embedded within the...”

Kylo only distantly hears the officer’s voice as he sees it, there at the far side of the market, at the boundary of First Order held territory.

The girl is young, scarce in her teens, dressed in the drab colors and asymmetrical cuts typical to the planet’s inhabitants. She’s carefully arranging the produce at her stand, calling back to an older man and woman dealing with customers, and he almost misses it as she turns back. 

But it’s there, clear as day, cutting through noise and haze and transparisteel and so very many burned bridges. 

Three buns, neatly tied but slightly askew, as if an uncertain hand had copied the style from sight alone. 

“Supreme Leader?” 

Kylo is still, measuring his breathing.

It could mean nothing. 

It could mean everything.

“Prepare a security detail,” he commands, and the distortion of his voice through the vocoder hides the weakness he fears would thunder through without it. “I will patrol the marketplace personally.”

The officer appears taken aback, clearing his throat before nodding and gesturing to the sleek-armored troopers behind them. 

* * *

The girl is gone by the time he makes his way to the stall where he’d seen her, wares somehow vanished into the ether.

Kylo grinds his teeth as other merchants watch him and his stormtrooper bodyguards with wary eyes, some of them packing up their own stalls while whispering amongst themselves. 

“Were you looking for someone in particular, Supreme Leader?” the captain asks, slinging his blaster rifle over his shoulder. “I can obtain vendor clearances for this sector. A squadron has already established a checkpoint at both entrances to this particular marketplace and is recording all movement.” 

He doesn’t answer, turning and stalking through the market thoroughfare in a sweep of black fabric, fists clenched and footsteps heavy as the troopers quickly follow. 

_ Just a ghost, _he wants to tell them. 

Just a memory of loss, of his own foolish pride. 

* * *

He sees it again the next day on a young woman eating ronto meat against a low wall, her eyes scanning the crowd near the docking bays. 

They detain her only briefly, his troopers checking her credentials before sending her on her way. 

Dark hair, too dark, looped into three buns. 

“Are you looking for someone, sir?” the new detail asks, and he doesn’t know how to answer.

Yes. 

No. 

Or the truth. 

That he’s afraid of what he might find. 

* * *

Two young red-headed girls playing with ragdolls in the central square. 

A blonde barmaid at the cantina with a tray propped against her hip. 

And worst of all, a brunette mechanic at the starport, with grimy hands and grease smudged against her cheek.

Three buns, all of them. He’d finally, in a moment of frustration, directed his troopers to ask them the significance of the hairstyle, and been given a bevy of answers. 

“Oh, it’s a traditional Batuu style, sir.” 

“Easier to keep it out of my face this way.” 

The barmaid is the most forthcoming (and the most frightened — by the time Kylo and his troopers track her down, she’s re-styled her hair into a haphazard braid), intimating that it was a style that had been spreading through Black Spire of late.

“There’s been rumors…” She hesitates, glancing behind her as she balances a tray of Bespin Fizzes, “that it’s something to do with the Resistance. A code of some kind.”

“You’re with the Resistance, then.” Kylo’s voice is cold and steeled, and he can see the abject terror in the barmaid’s eyes as she stares up at the imposing metal of his mask. 

“N-no, not me, Supreme Leader!” She bows her head, grasping the tray in both hands as they begin to shake. “It’s just that all the girls are wearing it these days, Resistance or not, after…” 

Her eyes widen as Kylo extends a hand, freezing her in place with the Force and carelessly rifling through her memories: a sea of drunken bar patrons, small, tidy quarters shared with some kind of furry beast… 

His blood turns to ice as he sees it, clear as day, clear as anything in his mind’s eye. 

Her robes are still the dark-gray she’d worn the last he saw her, but her hair is once more tied back and her eyes are… harder, somehow. Sadder. Her staff is slung across her back, no saber clipped to her belt (and how could there be, he thinks, remembers fighting with everything he had to draw it to him, to stop her, to stop _ this moment _ from ending and she’d begged him not to go this way but he would have killed Snoke again just to stop her from _ leaving _…) as she makes her way through Black Spire Outpost. 

Here, working diligently on a dingy-hulled X-wing as passerby stare at her curiously.

There, sitting at a low-slung booth in the back of the cantina and speaking in hushed tones to a dark-skinned woman with vibrant hair. 

All observed in passing, not registering her importance, and this girl is not Resistance, nothing but a bored inhabitant of Batuu drawn into an off-world war that holds no importance to her. 

“You’ve seen her,” Kylo murmurs, before he’s even realized he’s said it, and he can feel his troopers watching him. “The girl.” 

The barmaid nods quickly as Kylo releases her, gasping for air. “She… she’s often at the south end of the settlement.”

“Resistance territory,” and he narrows his eyes behind his mask even as he curses himself for yet another swell of weakness.

For hadn’t he seen her, there on Crait? Hadn’t he watched her stand at the ramp of the Millenium Falcon, evacuating the last stragglers of the Resistance, staring down at him like a cold, vengeful goddess as she’d severed the bond between them? 

Four months now. 

He’d once more donned the mask of Kylo Ren and taken up the mantle of Supreme Leader. 

She’d thrown her lot in with traitors, spies, and thieves. 

To be expected, of course, and he could almost laugh at it, how they’d both gone back to what they were best at, just like his _ parents_, Force damn them, and it hadn’t even taken a failure of a son to drive the two of them apart, him and Rey, just their own inability to bend. 

He was fairly certain, through it all, that his parents had loved each other, too. 

A boon he’d never been granted from her. 

The barmaid stares up at him, eyes wide and fearful, and she undoubtedly knows the price for associating with Resistance spies. 

“Your orders, sir?” the trooper at his left asks, but it’s a formality, and his blaster is already in his hands. 

It’s as easy as breathing, a brief slip into the man’s mind, a shifting of neurons, a heartbeat of a suggestion, and the troopers are flanking him as he stalks from the cantina, only vaguely registering the barmaid fleeing behind them. 

_ Weak fool, _something in him says, and it’s that same oily whisper, the one he’d thought had died with Snoke but still rises up, dark and rumbling, at the back of his consciousness with unsettling regularity. 

And he is, he knows. It’s a threat to his rule, however minor, to allow this small flame of the Resistance to continue to burn. There are examples to be made, rules to be upheld, a galaxy to be bent and crushed into submission. 

_ What have you done to me, _Kylo wonders, to Rey’s absent form, idly calls it across the fraught tether of a bond that no longer responds to him. 

She haunts him, still. His quarters aboard his ship are diligently sound-proofed, largely for fear that he’ll call her name in the brief, stolen moments of sleep he carves out for himself in between his rule. Every report of Resistance activity is scoured for the briefest taste of her, the names of sympathetic systems and possible allies only a secondary thought as he wonders if this planet, this system will be where they once again draw blades and face each other. 

It’s inevitable, really. 

Just like them. 

“Sir?” One of the troopers raises his comm. “Our troops in Merchant Row have detained what they believe to be a Resistance sympathizer. A woman without credentials, armed with…” He mumbles a quick confirmation into the comm. “...a quarterstaff? Mouthy thing, from the sounds of it. Has the same damn hairstyle we keep seeing. Your orders? ...sir?” 

Kylo does not answer as he stares to the south, to the edge of Black Spire. 

It’s faint, so faint that he strains to catch it, but it’s there, a ripple in the Force, a bending of waves, a shifting of particles. 

They’re magnetic, the two of them, eternally propelled towards one another even as she fights the pull and he wavers, throws himself ever more strongly to the Dark, to rebuilding the galaxy into something that can rise from the ashes of decades past. 

She is the enemy, and the day will come when he will face her and draw his weapon, just like that day in the forest when snow had whipped around them and he’d tried and failed to possess her. This, Kylo Ren knows in his heart, down to his bones: their battle is not yet finished. 

It’s a simple enough thing, and the Supreme Leader welcomes it even as Kylo feels his gorge rise at the thought of ever having to strike her down. 

_ She’s chosen her side, _ the darkness calls, soothes. _ She is our enemy, and she will be destroyed. _ ** _We _ ** _ will destroy her. _

But there’s a brush of light, just at the edge of his vision, always. 

He remembers her tears of loneliness, remembers every ounce of discipline and will it had taken not to take her into his arms and hold her as she wept. 

He remembers forcing his breathing to even as he stared down at her on the _ Supremacy_, as she’d entreated him to join her, all long lashes and soft eyes. 

Remembers the determination in those eyes as Snoke fell, as the Praetorian guards moved into formation and he chose _ her. _

Remembers her standing beside him in battle, fierce fire, the two of them fighting as two halves of a whole, feeling her heart singing through the Force as they triumphed. 

She hadn’t said it, but he had felt it through the Force for just a brief moment, _ Ben, here, we can be together, we don’t have to be alone ever again… _

But he’d turned to the throne. 

And he’d chosen again. 

They’d both of them had to live with that choice. 

And all of those that followed. 

It’s late afternoon, the sun cresting over a cloud bank on the horizon, and he feels Rey’s pulse in the Force, even at a distance. 

She’s frightened. Angry. Hard-edged and steeling herself for what a brush with the First Order might mean, how it might lead her to him once again. 

_ One day, _he thinks, and he allows himself this brief moment in the sun, and there’s a jolt as he wonders what it would be like to stand beneath it with her. 

_ But not yet. _

“Release her,” he says. 

The trooper stares at him curiously, glancing from Kylo to the comm. “But… sir…” 

Kylo inclines his head just a fraction, the silver-metal visor of his mask glinting in the light, and the trooper clears his throat.

“Release the detainee,” he says quickly. There’s a note of disbelief in the voice on the other end of the line, a rising question. “By orders of someone… highly-ranked in the First Order.” The trooper tips his head towards Kylo. “_ Very _highly-ranked.” 

Kylo ignores the brief exchange of clearance codes and finalizing of the prisoner release. He can feel the movement of the breeze against his cape, see the rays of sunlight piercing down to the thick trees forming the wilderness at the boundary of the outpost. 

The Force is calm, and he feels a brief, curious brush, just for the space of half a heartbeat. 

Then it’s gone, and with it the imprint of Rey. 

_ One day, _he thinks again. In snow. In fire. Water, air. 

Someday, there will be a battlefield. 

And perhaps, someday, on the other side, they will know peace, he and Rey.

Perhaps someday they will lay their weapons down in a quiet field and face each other as man and woman, open and yearning, all war and hurt long behind them.

_ One day, _ he hears on the breeze, and he could almost pretend it’s her. 

_ I’ll meet you there. _


End file.
